


Lifeline

by blu_eyed_demon



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Abusive Parent, M/M, captive Jace, mentions of Clace, post season one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-07
Updated: 2016-12-07
Packaged: 2018-09-07 04:56:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8784013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blu_eyed_demon/pseuds/blu_eyed_demon
Summary: Jace is Valentine's captive and has been for months but now he's found an unlikely source of support to help him through this dark time.





	

Jace lay as still as he could, eyes closed as he mimicked the slow, peaceful breathing that a deep sleep brings. When he heard the door close and the lock click, he breathed a sigh of relief. All those times he and Alec had pretended to be asleep when Maryse or Robert looked in on them as small kids had definitely paid off.

 

“Coast is clear.” He whispered after giving it a few moments and making sure footsteps were no longer audible.

 

A moment later there were some shuffling sounds and then the form of a person rolled out from under the bed, on the side furthest from the door.

 

“They lock you in every night?” Meliorn asked softly, voice low as he sat up beside the bed, in perfect position to hide again if the need arose.

 

Jace sat up slowly, he was shirtless in bed as always and though they could only see one another by the moonlight that came through a small, high up porthole window, it was enough that they could see one another's faces as Meliorn moved with that natural grace of his to sit on the bed.

 

“Anytime I'm alone. I'm not exactly trusted to stay put, especially after the last time Alec and Magnus tried to spring me. Are they, do you know? Are they ok?” He knew Alec couldn't be dead, the parabatai bond they had would have told him but he could still be hurt. Magnus could be worse, could be dead for all he knew. Valentine kept hinting at it and there had been so much blood when he'd regained consciousness.

 

The Clave had apparently already declared him a lost cause, Meliorn kept him updated on such matters when he could, but his friends hadn't. Their small group was alone without back up and up against an army that was growing everyday and so it wasn't really that surprising to Jace that no plans had worked yet. Their continued efforts though, they meant so much.

 

“Both are well, I saw them a day ago.” The Seelie told him, taking a hold of Jace's chin and guiding his head to the side to allow him to inspect the damage there. “Black eye, broken nose and split lip. I believe I count some broken ribs here too.” His other hand ran lightly over bruised skin on his chest and Jace fought the urge to flinch as Meliorn continued “You still have not told me what happened here.”

 

Jace pulled away, not liking the expression on the other man's face. “You're really going to do this every time? For every bump and scratch I get?”

 

He hadn't known who to reach out to at first, he'd struggled for months in silence in Valentine's water born prison and then an opportunity had come and a new ally had fallen in his lap. Of all the eventualities his father had covered for, all the magics he'd made warlocks use to block out contact between Jace and his shadowhunter allies, Jace having connections to Seelies had never crossed his mind. To think that his precious, perfect shadowhunter had worked with and fought beside a Seelie knight was beyond Valentine's limited thinking in everyway.

 

Jace had taken an opportune moment, sent a fire message and now here he was a month and a half later with Meliorn working on his escape. They were so close now, Jace had all the information he needed to help his Shadowhunter family back home fight the Circle's plans and now all they needed was a big enough distraction to make sure Meliorn had enough time to create a Seelie portal from scratch on the ship without being found. Which was harder than is sounded and it didn't exactly sound easy to Jace.

 

“Someone has beaten you, Jace Wayland. You did not slip over and get a 'boo boo'. So, please, tell me what happened to you.”

 

Jace bit his lip without thinking and winced at the spike in pain. His lip was still swelling, he could feel the heat in it. “Boo boo, huh? Been learning words from Izzy? Gonna kiss it all better for me?”

 

Meliorn didn't reply however, he simply sat and pointedly stared. It dragged on for several silent moments before Jace decided that even his stubbornness wouldn't ruin this brief contact he was having with someone who wasn't a nutcase Circle member.

 

He let out a sigh, just to make a point to the other man that he wasn't giving in lightly

 

“I refused to kill a werewolf kid. I stood in front of her instead, tried to protect her from Valentine and a group of his people. So I was punished for insubordination and for embarrassing him in front of his men.” He explained, shaking his head and shrugging as if taking a beating from a group being led by his own father was normal. Mostly because for Jace and his fucked up life, it was normal.

 

Living with Valentine, if he could call being his father's prisoner on this hellish ship 'living with Valentine', was a headfuck. He constantly professed to love Jace, to only want the best for him and sometimes Jace even found himself believing it. Valentine certainly seemed to mean it, trouble was Valentine's brand of love wasn't a love most people could want.

His rage was quick and violent but even his anger he would later claim was really all to help him. To make him better, stronger or whatever.

 

Jace tried his hardest to hold onto all he knew to be right and wrong, all he'd learnt being raised by the Lightwoods but Valentine had a way of spinning him about and turning everything around so much that Jace would start wondering if maybe he did have a point and that the sky had never really been blue. After the right mix of love and support with violence and contempt, Valentine seemed to make almost anything seem reasonable and right.

 

It sickened Jace every time he caught himself almost agreeing with the man.

 

Which was why Meliorn had taken to these fleeting visits that were almost nightly now. Jace was losing his grip the longer he was with Valentine, he knew it even if he didn't want to admit it out loud, and having someone from his old life there helped him balance the world out again for a while. In all this chaos, Meliorn was the calm in the centre of the storm. Meliorn the seelie who couldn't lie, who touched him gently like he was something worth taking care of. He treated him like a person and not a soldier.

 

Meliorn who was inspecting his face again, hand gently holding Jace's chin and guiding him to look one way and then the other in order to examine the extent of that afternoon's beating.

 

Jace braced himself for a reaction as Meliorn finally got a view of his face and neck on the other side of him. He was surprised though by how outraged Meliorn's reaction was. “He's branded you!”

 

He had never heard Meliorn get angry before, not even when the Clave had ordered him to the Silent Brothers, and yet seeing the fresh, raw red circle rune on Jace's neck had provoked him. In the half dark, Jace could see that he looked horrified.

 

“You, you never thought for a second that I agreed?” Jace asked, it was his turn to be surprised. In truth, he'd expected to be doubted for at least a few moments. He'd even half thought that Meliorn might think his resolve had caved after that day's beating and gone along with Valentine's demands.

 

Voice wavering slightly, Jace continued “And you called me Wayland before, but I'm not a Wayland. You, you must have heard that. I'm a-”

 

“Prisoner. Victim. I have visited here enough, sometimes without letting you know, I know all that he does to you to have the obedient son to trot out in front of his followers. He is a monster but you are not.” Meliorn told him simply, his voice still careful and hushed but there was an urgency. Like he needed Jace to know this if nothing else.

He was touching Jace again too, Jace realised. At some point, he and Meliorn had become effortlessly tactile with one another and he couldn't deny it felt good.

Meliorn's hand was on his neck, covering the disgusting rune that Valentine had forced on him and gripping gently.

 

“You were raised by Lightwoods and birthed by a Fairchild, these are facts also. Seelies do not have family names in quite the way your people do but we still believe firmly that names are power. So tell me, how does one man turning up when you are in adulthood and proclaiming relation to you change the essence of who you are as a man?”

 

Jace blinked, not really certain what to say to that. For a few fleeting moments he wanted to believe it but then he pulled away from Meliorn's touch, shaking his head fervently.

 

“No, there's something wrong with me, something rotten and bad. I fell in love with my sister Meliorn, I wanted her. I wanted her so badly and remembering that, or when thoughts pop in my head about her now and then I remember. It's sick. I'm sick.” He'd moved across the bed a little, putting more of a distance between them. Meliorn being close, Meliorn's touch, it all felt good and he didn't deserve anything good.

 

Meliorn listened, his expression as unreadable as ever. Another time, another place and Jace would have been more cautious because conversations with Seelies could be dangerous. Giving too much information could expose you and as Meliorn had just reminded him names had power. The old stories said that people had middle names, secret names, in order to protect them from a faery knowing their full name and having power over them. Yet here was Jace, experienced shadowhunter spilling his guts out to Meliorn. Laying himself bare and open, consequences be damned.

 

“I'm told you met a girl and saved her, you have been saving each other ever since and had no knowledge of any relation until it was too late. That is going to take time to adjust and undo. Is there really sickness in that?” Meliorn asked evenly and Jace chuckled darkly, shaking his head.

 

“What happened to the guy who was insulting me back in the Seelie glade?”

 

“What has happened to the self assured man who thought he knew it all?”

 

With no argument for that, Jace simply lay back and watched as Meliorn's fingertips started to glow. Seelie magic was different from warlock's though Jace didn't know the ins and outs of it. He supposed the angelic blood in the Seelie people changed the energy signature somehow. Where as with Magnus the air around him seemed to crackle and reverberate with power, Meliorn's felt far more natural as if he was bending nature to his will and guiding it in a gentler fashion. It was just as impressive and had just as much power in it, nature after all could be incredibly destructive.

 

The peaceful, warm white glow and Meliorn's presence undeniably helped some of the tension in his body to fade away. There was something comforting about the man being close to him, Jace had found himself thinking it many times. In fact, in the last few weeks Jace had noticed his mind drifted to Meliorn as opposed to Clary when he was thinking wistfully of being free.

 

At first he'd simply been relieved that he was thinking of his sister in _that_ way less and less but he couldn't deny that Meliorn was more than just a distraction. After so many nights of his company, his talking to Jace through the stress and fucked-up-ness, Jace genuinely liked Meliorn as a person and enjoyed his company. He liked that they had become tactile and that Meliorn was angry on Jace's behalf, that the circle rune had made him so clearly protective of Jace.

“What are you doing?” Jace asked softly after a long while, perhaps 20 minutes or more of simply laying in bed and watching Meliorn work.

 

“Preparing.” Meliorn told him once he had come to the end of what seemed like a incantation. “We cannot afford to wait much longer, the next time I come here I will not leave alone. Bane said we needed a week, I will not tolerate you being here for more than half that.”

Jace blinked, Meliorn said all of this in that even and matter-of-fact way of his like it was fact. He personally hadn't thought his situation was that dire, he knew what Valentine's idea of parenting was and it could get a lot worse. He opened his mouth to say all of this when footsteps started thundering seemingly in their direction.

 

The light of Meliorn's magic faded quickly to darkness before he gracefully and soundlessly slipped back onto the floor.

 

Jace lay there in the darkness, listening closely to the shouting. Grabbing his stele, he found the rune that enhanced his awareness and then focused on the commotion. Most the thundering feet where overhead but not all.

As a boy, his father had taught him languages that he hadn't worked on later with the Lightwoods. It meant that he was rusty but as Valentine moved around the world recruiting followers (mostly large, angry white men Jace couldn't help but notice) he'd found himself surrounded by people speaking a variety of languages some of which he understood. Jace had made a quick choice and played dumb around those men, it was a good way to get information that Valentine didn't feel like sharing with him.

“They've got some sort of new alarm to sense Seelie magic.” He whispered in translation to Meliorn, alarmed. “Twice? No, second time...shit, the alarm sensed you getting here too.”

And then Jace felt the colour drain from his face, he felt sick as he hissed “They're blaming Seelie prisoners, I didn't know we had any...oh fuck. They've got orders to kill. We just killed them.”

He felt sick to his stomach. Somehow he hadn't even known about these prisoners on board and yet he'd gotten them killed. There really was something bad in him. Rotten.

Jace opened his eyes as he felt Meliorn sit on the bed again. He was surprised when Meliorn's hand stroked his cheek it was surprisingly warm. An after effect of the magic, Jace supposed.

“I must go, perhaps I can help them. Promise me you will not blame yourself for this. She was right you know, Miss Fray. You pretend to be so hard and emotionless but you feel everything so much more.” His thumb was very, very lightly stroking Jace's cheek. The action was obviously mindful of the bruising and swelling that marred Jace's face. Meliorn was treating him like something that deserved tenderness and it startled him. That wasn't exactly a common thing in Valentine Morgenstern's world.

Irrationally, he found himself whispering desperately, asking the Seelie not to leave him. None of the others had managed yet to get messages to him since his damn father had found and smashed his cell phone.

He'd barely gotten any of his words out when Meliorn's lips were suddenly on his bruised swollen ones, brief but firm. When Meliorn pulled away, whatever Jace's expression was made him chuckle.

“Tell me you haven't been thinking of that since the day we met.”

Jace was not at all surprised to realise that, yes, that was true. It had occurred to him more than once. He'd had flings and so on with Seelies before, gender wasn't a big concern with them and he'd found he had a similar attitude himself. Saying all of this wasn't needed though, Meliorn knew it already he was sure.

Instead he returned the kiss with another but only briefly, he didn't want Meliorn's life on his conscience too.

 

“I will be back so don't lose hope. And don't do something Jace like and reckless.” Meliorn pushed something into his palm, it was immediately recognisable as a ring “Use this as much as you need.”

 

A few moments later and Meliorn vanished. The seelie magic he was using to do it didn't allow for 'ride alongs' because, well, that would have made escape simple and when was anything ever simple in Jace's life?

 

Laying in the dark, he slipped the ring on. It was strange but wearing the faery ring, knowing that Meliorn was on the other end, he felt less alone. He might be surrounded by nutters and fanatics but now he had a constant connection to his real life, to sanity. Maybe Meliorn would come through for him and it would only be a few more days. Just maybe.

 

He lay in the dark, feeling calmer than he had in weeks, but he didn't sleep. He needed to know what had happened first, the ship had fallen eerily quiet. Finally he heard the voice he'd been waiting for.

 

'The seelie children are safe, I have them back in the glade under the Queen's protection.' Meliorn voice floated into his mind, echoing. Opening his eyes, he could see an almost ghostly form of the man sitting on his bed.

 

The phrasing left room for adult casualties but if that was the case, Jace suspected that Meliorn had skirted the truth for his benefit and he wasn't about to look that gift horse in the mouth.

 

“Good,” Was all he managed, nodding a little. “Good.”

 

“So, you should do something for me now.” Meliorn continued, and Jace sat up a little. He wasn't certain exactly when they'd entered Seelie bargain territory but he was intrigued enough to go along with it without interjection. “Use your healing rune. Now. Don't give him satisfaction by allowing yourself to be bloody and bruised come morning.”

 

Jace felt an echo of the cocky guy he'd been before everything had gone to hell as he sat up and accused “You just want to check out my hot body some more.”

 

He let the covers fall away, exposing his bare chest right down to his hips and grabbed the stele from the side again.

 

“I'll enjoy the view much better when it is not marred by those marks.” Meliorn informed him, the Seelie was smiling just a little though Jace knew he was still concerned. “You don't deserve the pain and hurt, you know. I've heard a little of the childhood that man gave you, he is the one in the wrong and not you.”

 

Jace ran the stele over his iratze rune, using it as an excuse not to answer. Right and wrong, everything he'd ever known or believed was rooted in a lie. His father was not Michael Wayland. Trying to find the truth now in his past was like looking at memories through a kaleidoscope. It was all so fractured and jumbled he didn't know where to begin.

Valentine insisted that he was Jonathan, the prodigal son returned who just needed bad habits from the Lightwoods knocked out of him. He didn't want it to be true but sometimes he wondered.

 

Hearing someone, anyone call him Jace though. That was like calling to some part of him deep inside. Like it wasn't about truth or lie, it was just who he was. Jace.

 

“Your parabatai fears for you.” That made him drop his stele with a small thud as it hit the mattress.

 

“Alec? You've seen him?”

 

Meliorn nodded “He and Bane are part of the escape plan, Bane has enchanted the ring I gave you so that it is invisible when worn to protect you from your father's wrath in fact.”

 

The moonlight seemed weaker now, either clouds were out or it was now a poor comparison to the glow of Meliorn's magic, either way he could hardly see his hand but knowing that Meliorn and the others had that avenue covered was a relief. It hadn't immediately occurred to him that, of course, his father knew all about such rings.

 

"Jace, I must go but know this: if you were to hurt yourself in anyway, you would only be furthering Valentine's agenda.”

 

Jace stared at him for a moment, it took a few beats for him to understand what had Alec concerned. The words that he'd said that night when he and Clary has saved Meliorn, it seemed like a lifetime ago in so many ways.

 

_"I don't want to be alive if we're not on the same side, Alec!"_

 

“Not that I'm planning anything but he'd be pretty angry if he lost his puppet boy to march out in front of the troops.”

 

“You think giving him the perfect martyr he could mould and use for whatever wicked purpose wouldn't be even better for him? By dying, he can make you his own poster child who could never rebel or fight back.” Meliorn pointed out, "So hold onto what you know to be true. Do not lose hope and please wear my gift. I will help you get through this alive.”

 

“And then I'll owe you, right?” Jace managed to smile again, actually crack a joke. Meliorn's smile seemed easier and less concerned this time. Meliorn really was attractive, Jace noticed, especially when he smiled. He hadn't smiled much at all lately.

 

“A kiss or four that are freely given would be more than I could ask for. Goodnight, Jace Wayland.” And, with that, the ghostly image vanished but, with the ring on his finger, he could still feel Meliorn. He could feel that he wasn't alone anymore.

 

This ring had more enchantment on it than most, he decided as he replaced his stele on the beside table and settled down again.

 

He wasn't certain if it was his own thoughts or Meliorn sharing whispers with him. All he knew was that as he drifted off to sleep the same, reassuring thoughts washed over him. He felt calm and relaxed for the first time in weeks.

 

Not alone. He was not alone in this.

 


End file.
